ABC Wednesday: "F" is for Forbus General Store and Family

ABC Wednesday this week is brought to us by the letter "F" and a 2004 family vacation to Tennessee, where you can find the Forbus General Store - halfway between Davidson and Pall Mall.  "Where in tarnation is that!?" you ask?  Good question.  While the immediate answer may - accurately - be "the middle of nowhere", you can truly find it here, not too far south of the border with Kentucky.  You are truly out in the sticks if you find yourself in Forbus.  In fact, the main reason to pass through the tiny place is to visit the Sergeant Alvin York State Park - home of American World War I hero Alvin York, immortalized on film in the movie starring Gary Cooper from 1941.

How does one come to find such a small place?  Well, marry into a family with relatives that live nearby, of course!  My wife has family originally from the hills of Tennessee and so the whole family took a trip to visit a few years ago and we took a side trip one day. :)

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ABC Wednesday: "V" is for Valley

For this weeks' ABC Wednesday "V" is for Valley.

While there are a few places in central and west Florida that are hilly enough to have slight valleys I don't have any pictures of them, so the photos this week come from a family trip to Tennessee back in 2004 with my wife and her family, where mountains and valleys are common.


Wikipedia has this to say:

In geology, a valley (also called a vale or dale) is a depression with predominant extent in one direction. A very deep river valley may be called a canyon or gorge.

The above shot is from a lookout on the interstate in southern Tennessee looking over a large valley of the Smokey Mountains, so named because the air is often quite hazy, making things look smokey.

Below is one way we utilize valleys: dams. The dam in the shot is the Dale Hollow Dam (hollow would be pronounced 'holler' in Tennesee dialect), located in northern Tennesee on the Kentucky border an hour or two east of Nashville. The reservoir created by this dam covers 27,700 acres (112 km²) of water.

And lastly my lovely bride and I standing on Bee Rock in central Tennessee with a valley in the background.

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Carnton Plantation, Franklin, TN

Haven't taken many new pictures in the last week, so I must call upon my reserves - these from 2004 and a vacation in Tennessee we took with some of my wife's family to visit their ancestral home in the north central part of the state. But these photos are not from there... these are from a side trip I begged for: a day visiting Civil War sites nearby - Murfeesboro and Fanklin.

But today's photos are specifically of Carnton Plantation outside of Franklin, TN, which is just south of Nashville. The home was built in 1826 by former Nashville mayor Randal McGavock and was in the McGavock family until 1911, when it was sold, but was returned to the Carnton Association in 1977 to be restored as a museum. It was first listed on the national registry of historic places in 1973.

The front of the main house, facing North towards Franklin:



The back of the house, which is actually the first thing you see when visiting (this is standing in front of the gift shop where you purchase tickets for the tour):


A view from the second story veranda of the house gardens:


A quick shot snapped out of the car window of the Confederate cemetery that occupies two acres of the plantation grounds:

They don't allow photography inside, but it has been restored to mid-nineteenth century decor, including the furniture, wall coverings, etc. Quite interesting. More interesting, if not certainly more ghoulish, are the numerous blood stains on the hardwood floors, left by wounded and dying Confederate soldiers during the Battle of Franklin in November 1864. The house was used as a field hospital and many hundreds of soldiers were brought here inside the house and all over the outside grounds. Six Confederate generals died in the attack on Franklin, and four of them wound up here at Carnton laid out side-by-side on the back porch after the battle, including the promising young Patrick Cleburne, who was engaged to be wed in just a few more weeks. Sad story.

For more info on Carnton you can visit their website at http://www.carnton.org/

Horses on a Hill

Taken in 2004 in North Central Tennessee, about an hour and a half east of Nashville, near the town of Cookeville at a horse farm / ranch where we went to do some horseback riding, though the horses in this shot were not used for riding. Having never been on a horse in the hill country before it was quite an experience. Almost all of us felt certain that we were going to die at least once during the hour long ride. The horse riding ranches we've been to in our area of Florida are the type where the horses go one speed - slow - no matter what and follow each other slowly and the land is flat. These in Tennessee were not such horses. They would gallop, go through trees and bushes, stop, and - once we learned out to control them 3/4 of the way through the trip - do anything you told them to do. A little more training would have been nice other than, "Put your feet in the stirrups, hold this here rope thing, and hold on." :)